A Regulating for Growth Bill – a slogan up there with copulating for virginity and drinking for sobriety…
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The paper’s authors are too diplomatic to say it directly, but the implication is clear: Rachel Reeves is pursuing a policy that risks making the crisis she fears more likely, not less. Markets have noticed. Long-dated gilt yields have been rising for most of 2025 even as the Bank of England has been cutting interest rates, a dissociation that signals precisely the kind of underlying distrust the paper warns about. The question the paper ultimately poses is not an economic one. It is a political one. These reforms, the civil service reductions, the welfare tightening, the Bank of England adjustments, the net zero rephrasing, are all achievable. They were, in many cases, the settled common ground of British economic management not long ago. The question is whether any government has the nerve to implement them before a crisis compels it, or whether, as the authors quietly and rather despairingly note, “even among policy experts there is growing recognition that much of what needs to be done will not be attempted until a crisis compels it.“ That sentence should haunt anyone who reads it. Because what it describes is not a failure of economics. It is a failure of political will. And in a democracy that has spent six years lurching from one emergency to another, we should not be sanguine that the compulsion will arrive in time, or in a form we would choose. Break the glass now, or wait for someone else to break it for you. That is the choice. And this paper, to its credit, has at least had the honesty to say so. – Gawain Towler, discussing In case of emergency, break glass by The Centre for a Better Britain May 13th, 2026 | 10 comments
 “The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics. For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions. Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.” May 12th, 2026 | 33 comments
There is, however, a still more fundamental cause, one I have not ceased to articulate: our managerial system of government is breaking down under the weight of a welfare state we cannot afford and which fails to meet expectations. Promises made to successive generations cannot be met from our productive output. The gap has been filled by debt and by the systematic debasement of the currency since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. In the nineteenth century, a pound in 1900 bought roughly as much as a pound in 1800. Since 1971, the purchasing power of money has collapsed. That is not a coincidence. That is policy. I put this thesis to Rishi Sunak in a private meeting. He readily agreed I was right. The room of some thirty MPs looked crestfallen, until someone said, “But we can’t do anything about it before the election” whereupon everyone relaxed and reverted to type. That moment encapsulates our problem precisely. Liz Truss understood the fiscal reality and tried to act on it. She was also, simultaneously, spending enormous sums on an energy bailout. The bond markets noted the contradiction and drew their own conclusions. She was unlucky with undiagnosed structural problems in bond markets while caught between two incompatible imperatives. Her underlying diagnosis was not wrong. It turns out reality is not optional. You can ignore it, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring it. Rachel Reeves and the whole nation are discovering this now, after the Chancellor brought welfare cuts to MPs who told their constituents for years that austerity is a choice and said, “No thank you!” Starmer’s current crisis sits at this junction: a government elected on the promise that “change” would be painless, running head‑first into the arithmetic they declined to discuss. May 12th, 2026 | 22 comments
The way in which they miss the point, is exactly why Labour does. It describes a desire for democratic control of institutions as a ‘dark path’ yet simultaneously support a party that is bringing in Digital ID, curtailing jury trials and the rest. We are on a dark path already. May 12th, 2026 | 2 comments
The above Acts and the provisions within them are used to arrest and prosecute people for various speech- and communication-related offences. Because the above legislation is vague, subjective, and (with the exception of the Online Safety Act 2023) drafted in an era before the internet existed or was widely used, these Acts are prime examples of bad law, even outside of the political issues we might take with them. This gives the police and judiciary the power to decide which ‘offences’ are selectively enforced, and, in the case of the Public Order Act 1986, even gives this power to the government itself (as deployed by Keir Starmer after Southport). Some will try to argue that, because the United Kingdom is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and incorporates this into domestic law via the Human Rights Act 1998, free speech is protected. Unfortunately, this is false. Article 10 of the ECHR states the following:
However, this is a qualified right, and is subject to national restrictions and limitations, as laid out in domestic law:
It is this qualification that gives the police and judiciary, using the above Acts of Parliament, the ability to restrict and criminalise certain forms of speech, communication, and expression. The free speech protections under Article 10 of the ECHR are nowhere near as stringent or comprehensive as something like the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads much more broadly and has been vigorously defended by the US Supreme Court:
May 11th, 2026 | 4 comments
But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defence spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defence spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”. In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling. – Jonny Ball writing What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong May 10th, 2026 | 22 comments
The shape of England’s local government this morning is one that neither of the governing parties of the previous century would recognise. Reform controls councils across a geography that would have seemed fantastical three years ago: the coalfields of Yorkshire and the North East; the post-industrial heartlands of the West Midlands; the prosperous Essex commuter belt; a London borough; the county halls of ancient Conservative shires. The party that did not exist at a local level in 2022 is now the second largest force in English local government. Labour has lost control of towns it has governed since the age of Harold Wilson. The Conservatives have lost county councils they held through Thatcher and Major and every convulsion since. Both parties are being eliminated simultaneously, Labour in the post-industrial north and midlands, Conservatives in the shires, by the same insurgency operating through different electoral vintages in different places. The political establishment consoled itself after 2025 with explanations about protest votes and mid-term difficulty and the challenges of governing. Those explanations have not survived 2026. The protest vote does not win fifty-eight of seventy-five seats in Sunderland. The mid-term difficult does not take Wakefield from a party that held it for half a century. Something more fundamental has changed, and the thirds system means that those councils still holding on by accumulated history will find out, in twelve months, what Wakefield found out on Thursday. The tide is still rising. The next wave is already dated.
May 9th, 2026 | 24 comments
The simple fact is that the Ofcom Fees Duties are expressed to be binding, they are a functional burden on American speech, and they are imposed for the purpose of funding an official censor. The Ofcom Fees Duties are a British censorship tax on American speech, no matter what language Ofcom chooses to dress it up in. In the United States, those are unconstitutional. See Grosjean v. American Press Co. or Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue. May 9th, 2026 | 9 comments
“Oui, la récompense la plus agréable qu’on puisse recevoir des choses que l’on fait, c’est de les voir connues, de les voir caressées d’un applaudissement qui vous honore.” “Yes, the most pleasant reward one can receive from the things one does is to see them recognised, to see them greeted with applause that honours you.” – Molière, – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme -*- Wise words. Combine them with the equally wise saying “If you want a job done, do it yourself”, and you get this: French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize, as reported by the Guardian‘s Kim Willsher:
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I’d give one of his novels a go, if any have been translated into English. But perhaps he ought to consider a change of genre, given his demonstrable talent for producing realistic fiction.
Don’t be too sad for Professor Chomsky. He has had awards, prizes, fellowships, honorary degrees, medals and memberships of learned academies poured upon him, not to mention his being the recipient of personal monetary tokens of esteem. His trophies surround him like a glittering ocean. Their lustre can scarcely be dimmed by one of them turning out to be an academic vanity project. The Guardian article then quotes the public prosecutor, Paul-Édouard Lallois:
It begins to arise, certainly. But does the notion of fraud ascend all the way into full existence? Like the man accused of wearing a toupée to cover his baldness who replied, “It’s all my own hair – I paid for the toupée myself”, Professor Montaclair could defend himself on the grounds that those in charge of awarding the Gold Medal of Philology sincerely believed he was a worthy laureate. Montaclair could also point out that many prestigious academic prizes are awarded by foundations that are the creations of one man, with the only difference from his International Society of Philology being that their founders were rich enough to rent offices in a nice part of town and persuade or hire famous names to serve as judges. Montaclair clearly sought to hide his award to himself among his awards to other people such as Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky. If he had remained undetected he might well have managed to pick up a few well-known academic names to serve alongside him in deciding who should receive future Gold Medals. Perhaps his plan was to discreetly retire once the whole process had become self-sustaining. Or if one wants something more democratic, the media will laud as “world-leading” bodies such as the International Association of Genocide Scholars that allow anyone who pays a fee to become a voting member. Professor Montaclair could say that his society… just hadn’t got any other members yet. In the end, I would say that even if he does somehow manage to escape a penalty under French law, his use of his home-minted Gold Medal to gain promotion was morally a fraud. And, OK, the whole International Society of Philology being made from his left sock was a bit dodgy too. But the line between a fraud and a gutsy founder operating on the principle of “if you build it, they will come” is not utterly clear cut. Despite being a five times winner of the Prix de l’Academie Solent, I find this a difficult philosophical question. May 8th, 2026 | 7 comments
Can someone artistic come up with a graphic mashup of John Lydon & Nigel Farage? 😀 BTW, Lydon is actually a very bright and in many ways deeply admirable figure. May 8th, 2026 | 19 comments
The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrian Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak. So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates: 2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis. 1997. Opening the borders. 1987. Leaving the NHS untouched. 1969. Failure to defeat the IRA. 1965. Race Relations Act. 1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty. 1963. Robbins Committee. c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm. 1948. Nationalisation of rail. 1947. Town & Country Planning Act. 1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard. 1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law. 1922. Creation of the BBC. 1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs. 1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise. 1910. People’s Budget et al. 1910. Payment of MPs. 1906. Taff Vale Judgement. 1890s. Death Duties. 1875. Trade Union Act. 1870. Forster Act. 1845. Banking Act. Anything I’ve missed? May 7th, 2026 | 33 comments
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